Thursday, January 19, 2006
Save Kevin Cooper?
Another death row case...
OpinionJournal - Extra:
""Cooper's case is one in which it's hard to imagine anyone jumping on his bandwagon. He was an inmate at the California Institution for Men in Chino, serving time for burglary, when he escaped on June 2, 1983. Two days later he broke into the Chino Hills home of the Ryen family as they were sleeping and killed the parents, Douglas and Peggy, along with 10-year-old Jessica Ryen and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, a friend of Joshua Ryen, who was the only family member to survive. 'The first time I met Kevin Cooper I was 8 years old and he slit my throat,' Joshua Ryen testified at an April 22 hearing in U.S. District Court in San Diego. 'He hit me with a hatchet and put a hole in my skull. . . . I laid there 11 hours looking at my mother who was right beside me.'
But Cooper does not lack supporters: the likes of Jesse Jackson, Mike Farrell, Richard Dreyfuss, Sean Penn and Denzel Washington have come to his defense. One would think that appropriate monikers for Cooper would have career-sensitive celebrities running for the hills: Ax murderer. Child killer. Mass murderer.
It's apparently lost on them that the people they're dealing with are master manipulators."
